Through a kind of hallucinogenic vehicular transmogrification, it has become the Google bus, shuttling geeks between their homes in San Francisco and the company’s headquarters in Mountain View. The makeover is, on the surface, extreme. The Kesey bus was a 1939 International Harvester school bus bought for peanuts; the Google bus is a plush new Van Hool machine that goes for half a million bucks. The Kesey bus was brightly colored, a rolling Grateful Dead poster; the Google bus is drab and anonymous, a rolling Jos. A. Bank suit. The Kesey bus was raucous and raunchy; the Google bus is hushed and chaste. The Kesey bus carried a vat of LSD for connecting with the group mind; the Google bus has wi-fi.
Kesey’s Pranksters named their bus Further. If the Google bus had a name, it would be Safer.
Despite the differences, both buses are vehicles of communalism and transcendence.

…

It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years. . . . The best part is this: the people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology—they won’t follow you out there.
The Kesey bus dead-ended somewhere in Mexico, its allegorical gaskets blown. The Google bus continues on its circuit between the City and the Valley, an infinite loop of infinite possibility.
THE MYTH OF THE ENDLESS LADDER
April 6, 2014
“ULTIMATELY, IT’S A VIRTUOUS CYCLE,” writes economics reporter Annie Lowrey in a Times Magazine piece on computer automation’s job-displacing effects, “because it frees humans up to work on higher-value tasks.” The challenge today, she goes on, “is for humans to allow software, algorithms, robots and the like to propel them into higher-and-higher-value work.”

If I were old, I’d just take Uber,” the Los Angeles Times reports one San Francisco techie saying to his friends after reluctantly giving up his seat to an old lady on a Muni bus.29 Perhaps old ladies take Muni, I would have explained, because they can afford the $0.75 senior’s fare, whereas Travis Kalanick’s Uber service, with its surge pricing, could cost them $94 for a two-mile ride.
And then there’s what the San Francisco–based writer Rebecca Solnit dubs, collectively, “the Google Bus.”30 These are sleeker and more powerful buses, menacingly anonymous in their absence of any identifying marks, with the same kind of opaque, tinted windows that masked the Battery from the prying eyes of the outside world. Unlike the Muni’s legacy buses, the Google Bus isn’t for everyone. It is a private bus designed to transport tech workers from their expensive San Francisco homes down to the offices of Google, Facebook, and Apple. Google alone runs more than one hundred of these daily buses, which make 380 trips to its Googleplex office in Mountain View.31 These luxurious, Wi-Fi-enabled private buses—which, in total, make around four thousand daily scheduled pickups at public Bay Area bus stops—have been superimposed on top of San Francisco’s public transit grid by tech companies that have even begun to employ private security guards to protect their worker-passengers from irate local residents.32
The Google Bus has sparked such animosity from locals that, in December 2013, protesters in West Oakland attacked one of them, smashing a rear window and so outraging Tom Perkins that he compared the glass breaking to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany.33 And, as if to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, 2014 is the year that these demonstrations have become more politically organized and coherent.

…

Google alone runs more than one hundred of these daily buses, which make 380 trips to its Googleplex office in Mountain View.31 These luxurious, Wi-Fi-enabled private buses—which, in total, make around four thousand daily scheduled pickups at public Bay Area bus stops—have been superimposed on top of San Francisco’s public transit grid by tech companies that have even begun to employ private security guards to protect their worker-passengers from irate local residents.32
The Google Bus has sparked such animosity from locals that, in December 2013, protesters in West Oakland attacked one of them, smashing a rear window and so outraging Tom Perkins that he compared the glass breaking to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany.33 And, as if to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, 2014 is the year that these demonstrations have become more politically organized and coherent. They are even spreading outside the Bay Area, with antigentrification protests taking place in February 2014 in Seattle against private Microsoft buses.34
Kristallnacht it certainly isn’t.

…

Protesters in San Francisco’s Mission District waved such a construction-style sign outside the Google buses.53 “Public $$$$$$$$$ Private Gains,” another sign said.54 Others were less polite about these mysterious buses’ whisking their expensive cargo of privileged, mostly young white male workers down to Silicon Valley. “Fuck off Google,” came the message from West Oakland.55
Rebecca Solnit’s drawing attention to the “Google Bus,” which rides on public infrastructure and stops at public bus stops but is a private service run by private companies, has become the most public symbol now of this economic division between Silicon Valley and everyone else.
“I think of them as the spaceships,” is how Solnit describes this new feudal power structure in Silicon Valley, “on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.”

However, they compete for space on the roads with school and municipal bus services, and people who live along their routes but who don’t get free gourmet food at their workplaces think of them as the equivalents of the club railway carriages of Victorian robber barons. According to an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘San Franciscans feel resentful about the technology industry’s lack of civic and community engagement, and the Google bus is our daily reminder.’ It seems unfair that some people should have fun commuting, while others are packed together in havens for exotic bacteria.
The companies that run the buses point out that each one takes fifty or so cars off the road, and so alleviate jams rather than causing them. Employees who commute on them are also ready to speak up for their benefits to the community and indeed the planet.

Globalization has run out of steam, and central banks are trying to overcompensate for governmental inertia. The lack of growth exacerbates inequality even more and threatens social stability. But growth also comes with often overlooked costs and unintended consequences, such as the depletion of natural resources, exploitation of others, misallocation of human capital, and distortion of political systems.
In his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Douglas Rushkoff argues that we are caught in a growth trap, where we have lost track of the purpose of the economy and made growth an end in itself, driving a jobless recovery and low-wage economy.45 But what if we are unable to produce substantially stronger growth? What if growth is limited? The think tank Club of Rome argued in its 1972 research report The Limits to Growth that growth cannot continue indefinitely because resources like water, food, and energy are limited.

The protesters flinging feces at the Google-buses in downtown San Francisco gave voice to frustration that rich techies are taking over the City by the Bay; but the protest was based on scant logic. The private buses were taking cars off the roads, reducing pollution, minimizing traffic, and fighting global warming. Could flinging feces at a Google-bus turn back the clock and reduce prices of housing to affordable levels?
The 2016 presidential campaign was the national equivalent of the Google-bus protests. The supporters of Donald Trump, largely white and older, wanted to turn back the clock to a pre-smartphone era when they could be confident that their lives would be more stable and their incomes steadily rising. The Bernie Sanders supporters, more liberal but also mostly white (albeit with great age diversity), wanted to turn back the clock to an era when the people, not the big corporations, controlled the government.

Oxford Internet Institute, August 2014, ipp.oii.ox.ac.uk/2014/programme-2014/track-a/labour/sara-kingsley-mary-gray-monopsony-and.
Oxford University’s Martin Programme on Technology and Employment is a critical resource for information on automation and the future of work. It can be found at www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/201501_Technology_Employment.
Andrew Gumbel, “San Francisco’s Guerrilla Protest and Google Buses Swells into Revolt,” Guardian, January 25, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/25/google-bus-protest-swells-to-revolt-san-francisco.
Tom Perkins, “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?” Letter to the Editor, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014, www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316913982034286.
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (London: Melville House, 2015). This is a funny, biting chronicle of the world of “bullshit jobs.”

Until we do, we remain incapable of properly seeing, much less changing, the functioning of our businesses or the economy in which they operate. We are destined to repeat the same old mistakes. Only this time, thanks to the speed and scale on which digital business operates, our errors threaten to derail not only the innovative capacity of our industries but also the sustainability of our entire society. People throwing rocks at the Google bus will be remembered as the tremor before the quake.
Or we may come to our senses and choose a different path. We are at a critical crossroads. Every businessperson, employee, entrepreneur, or creator reading this book understands that we are all operating on borrowed time and borrowed money. We need to make a choice. We can continue to run this growth-driven, extractive, self-defeating program until one corporation is left standing and the impoverished revolt.

pages: 356words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by
Richard Florida

“You live your comfortable lives surrounded by poverty, homelessness and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success.” Several protesters climbed atop a Yahoo bus, and one, as was widely reported, vomited on its windshield. In San Francisco’s Mission District, protesters dressed as clowns formed human pyramids, bounced giant exercise balls, and performed the can-can in front of a Google bus.
For the San Francisco–based activist and writer Rebecca Solnit, those buses were akin to “spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.” “A Latino who has been an important cultural figure for forty years is being evicted while his wife undergoes chemotherapy,” she wrote. “One of San Francisco’s most distinguished poets, a recent candidate for the city’s poet laureate, is being evicted after 35 years in his apartment and his whole adult life here: whether he will claw his way onto a much humbler perch or be exiled to another town remains to be seen, as does the fate of a city that poets can’t afford.”

No one has written a more thoroughly researched or engaging book on this topic than Tapscott and Tapscott.”
—Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT; coauthor of The Second Machine Age
“An indispensable and up-to-the-minute account of how the technology underlying bitcoin could—and should—unleash the true potential of a digital economy for distributed prosperity.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
“Technological change that used to develop over a generation now hits us in a relative blink of the eye, and no one tells this story better than the Tapscotts.”
—Eric Spiegel, President and CEO, Siemens USA
“Few leaders push us to look around corners the way Don Tapscott does. With Blockchain Revolution he and his son Alex teach us, challenge us, and show us an entirely new way to think about the future.”

Besides a number of work-related courses (“Managing Within the Law,” “Advanced Interviewing Techniques”), there were classes in creative writing, Greek mythology, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and, for those contemplating a new career funded with Google gains, “Terroir: The Geology & Wines of California.”
In April 2010, a software engineer named Tim Bray blogged his experiences as a Noogler on a single day at Mountain View. He woke up at a Google Apartment, a temporary arrangement while visiting from his home base in Seattle. He caught a Google Bus to the campus, doing a bit of work using the Google Wi-Fi supplied to the passengers, arriving in time for free breakfast at one of the Google cafés. For lunch, a companion took him to the Jia café across a few parking lots, known for its excellent sushi. (Thursday was Hot Pot day.) Later in the afternoon he wanted to buy a new camera, so he borrowed one of the free electric-powered Toyota Priuses available to employees and drove to a Best Buy to make his purchase.